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Boardgame Legacy games vs SRPGs

pakoito

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Jun 7, 2012
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After finding myself playing Gloomhaven at a friend's and craving for more of it, I was left with the choices of playing it as a boardgame or as a digital adaptation. When I looked into the later, I failed to see the differences with a regular SRPG crawler.

Now that both genres are approaching, is the difference meaningful enough to prefer one to the other? Are longs setup times in exchange for a more visual board worth the time? Does the automation of meaningless task remove the need for physical editions?

And most important of all. Are the boardgames actually have better designed systems and encounters than the videogames?
 
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J1M

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May 14, 2008
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Transparent calculations that can be performed by a human serve as an important design constraint in the board game space. Few designers are willing to apply similar constraints to computer games.
 

pakoito

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Is Gloomhaven worth the price of admission?
Pay for Tabletop Simulator, use the workshop mod, assess yourself. Mechanically it's more interesting than most games*, and I'm neither a story person nor I played for long enough to start caring so dunno.

* tl;dr in your turn you can play any pair of cards in your deck. Cards have a top and a bottom ability and you can only play one of each in the pair of cards you play per turn. Alternatively, you can retire one used card for the rest of the encounter to recover all other cards already used. You don't have many cards so it's a race. Each character deck feels tweaked as fuck, and so do most encounters.
 
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Snorkack

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Is Gloomhaven worth the price of admission?
If you're into dungeon crawler BGs, then 100% yes. Me and my GH group play monthly day-long sessions since Oct '18 and we just finished the base game content. Leagues ahead of Descent, Zombicide and so on.

Doesn't click as a PC game for me tho. In board games, I value haptics, bits and pieces and the ability to look my opponents in the face. In pc games I value complex in-game systems and low out-of-game organizational overhead. Both concepts don't translate very well into the respective other domain.
 
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